I remember my high school English Lit teacher angrily saying “Jim Conklin is not a Christ figure!”. Apparently a lot of students wrote that in their reports on Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. They must have gotten the idea from Cliff’s Notes or Monarch Notes or something.
My favorite “J.C.” figure is Jiminy Cricket. Go ahead – prove to me that he isn’t a Christ figure.
(Actually, he sort of seriously is a Christ figure. The Cricket in Carlo Collodi’s (Carlo Lorenzini) original book The Adventures of Pinocchio isn’t named – he’s just called “Cricket”. It was the Disney film that attached the name “Jiminy” to him. “Jiminy Cricket(s)” was a mild exclamation or oath, especially popular in the American Midwest (although the Disney animators put it in the mouth of one of the Darling children in Peter Pan), where Walt and several of his animators grew up. It seems pretty clear to me that, because of those initials, “Jiminy Crickets” was a euphemism for saying “Jesus Christ”,. It’s a little more opaque than such assonances as “Cheese on Rice!” or “Judas Priest!” or “(Great) Caesar’s Ghost!”, but it’s a way for kids and the timid to almost exclaim “Jesus Christ!” in moments of high emotion.)